Cyberbeats

Forty years ago, the literary maelstrom of Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs paved the way for the digital revolution.

Allen Ginsberg told death to wait in line. He had some unfinished business with the morality police.

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Poet, pop star, political activist, spiritual avatar, all crowded onto his résumé. And here was Ginsberg, at age 70, lying prone on his bed in San Francisco's Hotel Triton, delivering what would turn out to be his final extended interview. Within four months, the congestive heart failure that had chronically ailed him would take his life.

Ginsberg wheezed and coughed his way through a retrospective of the Beat movement that surged through the American literary scene in the 1950s. Other Beats often dubbed him the great communicator of their ideal of cultural freedom, but he spoke with a humility and enthusiasm that would suggest he was simply a fan.

At the slightest mention of censorship, however, Ginsberg's demeanor changed dramatically. He elbowed his upper body erect off the hotel mattress and breathed fire: "The law infringes on my free market, yet it's the very free-market bullshit artists that are doing this. What hypocrites!" Ginsberg was never one to take restrictions on his free expression lying down. In 1957, US Customs Service agents impounded his London-published poetry collection Howl on charges of obscenity. The ensuing court battle catapulted the Beats off the pages of obscure literary rags and into the national spotlight.

An unrepentant Ginsberg maintained to the end that state censorship degrades democracy. "It's all about mind and body control for the sake of power," he rasped, his legs now dangling over the edge of the bed. "And today the fight continues over the Internet."

The Beats and the digerati? The art of communication sure brings together odd companions. Ginsberg's link, however, surpasses poetic hyperbole. While the Beats' writing method and brazen lifestyle were deemed downright quirky in the 1950s, the collective aesthetic of Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, Ginsberg, and friends portends streams of consciousness that emerge with remarkable clarity in the digital age.

It all starts, and ends, "on the road." Dean Moriarty and Sal Paradise, the primary characters in Kerouac's legendary novel, search for something they can believe in and, hell, all the ecstasy and transcendence they can stand along the way. Kerouac places Dean and Sal into full contact with the unknown and unfamiliar, and flashes of revelation appear to them from the most unlikely sources. They discover by trip's end that the mystery of the open road lies not in any particular destination, but the perennial drift toward connection.

That message would fit comfortably on the dust jacket of Sherry Turkle's latest who-are-we-now treatise, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. The MIT professor tracks personal identity in the digital age and concludes that we invent who we are as we move in and out of social encounters and adapt to a variety of social roles. We build a sense of reality out of the associations we make. Turkle identifies the Net as "a significant social laboratory for experimenting with the constructions … of the self that characterize postmodern life."

Kerouac and Turkle write out of vastly different social contexts, of course. Kerouac was rebelling against a strongly imposed view of the self. Astute cultural critics of the '50s depicted postwar America as a one-dimensional society run by "organization men" who produced mass culture for the consumption of "lonely crowds." Any variance from the conformity was akin to treason. "What is good for GM is good for America" ran the slogan that dictated behavior ranging from the economic to the personal. Kerouac and his peers challenged that stability with their provocative tales of self-discovery that openly violated sexual, racial, and cultural mores.

In Turkle's postmodern world, many of the institutions that once bound people together – the bank on Main Street, a neighborhood church, a union hall – have now become objects of nostalgia. The places we meet others today, she writes, tend to be much more transitional, offering services and relationships that address small parts of our lifestyles. The relationships we build in work, family, school, and neighborhood overlap only slightly. Postmodern individuals endlessly recycle through communities to which fragments of their identities are bound.

In Life on the Screen, Turkle relates the story of Gordon, a man who was raised in two homes after his parents divorced while he was still in grade school. He spent winters with his mother in Florida and summers with his father in California, and Gordon was deeply hurt that his mother rented out his room whenever he went off to California. His sense of displacement continued after he went to college, only to drop out a year later upon realizing that he could succeed at computer programming without a formal education. Turkle demonstrates how Gordon's role-playing in several MUDs helped him find integrity and consistency in the diverse "personae" he had been simultaneously raised to be.

Likewise, Kerouac's characters struggled to find their individuality within the invented consensus of a mass culture. Hungering for fresh sources of information, they slipped into the worlds of others and began similar role-playing experimentation. Hobos and racial outcasts intrigued Kerouac, while Ginsberg gravitated toward sexual outlaws and Burroughs befriended drug addicts and criminals. Raised in middle-class malaise, these writers desired to see a world that was set free from control and conformity.

Inspired by the rawness of his encounters, Kerouac changed his writing method to mirror the movement of time. Writing was dead, he argued, once it was made to bow before prescribed rules, narrow selectivity, punctuation, and revision. He wanted his writing to "bop" as spontaneously as the improvisational saxophone scat of Charlie Parker or the action painting of Jackson Pollock. Exhausting the forms of language would give him, he hoped, new insights into how the world might be reassembled. He likened his writing method to "swimming in a language sea," an unintended yet colorful description of hypertext for a digital generation.

Starting with On the Road, Kerouac recorded whatever impressions or memories spilled out of his mind, deliberately repressing his obsessions for finding the "right" word or idea. His motto: first thought, best thought. He quickly ran into an obstacle, however. His flow was interrupted each time he had to feed a new sheet of paper into the typewriter. To remain uninterrupted, he typed on long rolls of teletype paper. Over the course of only three days in 1953, he wrote The Subterraneans, a barely fictionalized account of one of his love affairs.

Kerouac felt that he had stumbled on "the only possible literature of the future" and foresaw a day when the means of communication would facilitate not only spontaneous prose, but a more immediate exchange of ideas as well. While his insights are uncannily prescient of the arrival of email, at the time Kerouac could only imagine its advent in science fiction terms, naming it "space age prose." "It may be they won't be reading anything else but spontaneous writing when they do get out there, the science of language to fit the science of movement," Kerouac wrote.

To help Ginsberg and Burroughs appreciate his transformation as a writer, Kerouac prepared a laundry list of attitudes and techniques he considered essential for spontaneous prose . One pithy phrase captures the spirit of his list: "Something you feel will find its own form."

Kerouac's "essentials" read like a survival manual for the denizens of electronically mediated virtual communities. Cyberspace pundit Allucquère Rosanne (Sandy) Stone, in fact, suggests that success in online encounters requires the ability to perform "lucid dreaming in an awake state." Stone, who directs the University of Texas Advanced Communication Technologies Laboratory, thinks that people who participate in MUDs and other simulated environments gain interactive ways of processing information that enhance perception in physical environments as well. Their imaginations do not stop firing once they leave their avatars. Like the traveler who comes home from an immersion in a foreign culture, the virtual expatriate comes back to the real world with new perspectives on what once was not only too familiar, but also seemed incapable of change.

Stone's belief that MUDs permit the growth of more fluid and dynamic personae resembles the "language of movement" Kerouac once imagined. "The soul or some improbable avatar routinely travels free of the body, and a certain amount of energy is routinely expressed in managing the result of its travels," comments Stone in her book The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age.

The Beats, of course, turned to fiction and poetry as their tools for creativity. Writing gave them license to blur lines and make associations that bent the rules of publicly ordered social life. Connections that made no sense (or were not allowed to exist) in the real world took on a life of their own in imaginary environments. Even when their subject matter was autobiographical, which it often was, the Beats usually danced behind the masks of their characters and tropes. Kerouac, for example, detailed in each of his novels the names and places of his daily encounters, yet freely fictionalized these slices of reality whenever it served the movement of the story.

While other Beats followed Kerouac into a spontaneous prose, Burroughs developed a montage style of writing that he believed more faithfully mirrored the process of human perception than did representational writing. Utilizing a crude cut-and-paste method, he did not so much write a book as design it. His stated goal was to impose neither plot nor continuity, but splice together as many images as possible simultaneously.

Burroughs was frustrated by the inherent limitations of communicating information solely through a two-dimensional sheet of paper. He astonished readers with his preface to his 1959 novel Naked Lunch, which brazenly claimed that its words could have worked just as easily in any order. His description of the ideal presentation of the book has more the feel of a Web page than hard copy: "The book spill off the page in all directions, kaleidoscope of vistas, medley of tunes and street noises, farts and riot yipes and the slamming steel shutters of commerce."

The Beats' collective literary philosophy evoked a furious backlash from many public intellectuals. Norman Podhoretz delivered one of the more biting critiques in his influential Partisan Review essay, "The Know-Nothing Bohemians." In effect, Podhoretz's diatribe resembles the kind of suspicion that the print media today frequently direct toward the Internet. Early last year, for example, The New York Times cautioned its readers: "Partly owing to free-speech protection, the Internet lacks a quality-control mechanism to separate fact from hyperbole or from outright falsehood…." Podhoretz, for his part, warned that the Beats' faith in human passion and celebration of "incoherence" was sure to lead to moral breakdown, particularly among America's youth.

Podhoretz missed the subtlety of spontaneous prose, but he rightly sensed the Beats' general suspicion of intellectualism. While the industrial world touted empirical reason as the sole path to the truths that really matter, the Beats placed their trust in the dawn of a new age that would value intuition and imagination as equally critical to the production of knowledge. They believed that reason alone was incapable of keeping pace with a world of rapidly changing truths.

One thought logically following another and centrally organized fit a mass consumer, a mass media, and a mass political structure. The Beats insisted that the new consciousness be discontinuous. They reveled in chaos, where patterns emerge but last no longer than the period for which they are relevant or meaningful. If nothing is fixed or permanent, creativity can run amok. Keeping up with the flow of reality, then, demands constant awareness. Philip Whalen, then Beat writer and now Buddhist monk, succinctly articulated the spirit of the Beats in his poem "Sourdough Mountain Lookout":

What we see of the world is the mind's Invention and the mind Though stained by it, becoming Rivers, sun, mule-dung, flies – Can shift instantly A dirty bird in a square time

These "material-symbolic-psychic" connections lie at the heart of Donna Haraway's contemporary theories of technoscientific culture. Haraway, a professor in the History of Consciousness program at the University of California at Santa Cruz, shares the Beats' passion to affect the language and concepts upon which a worldwide web of relationships depend. Her ultimate interest is to pursue "which connections matter, why, and for whom?"

Haraway finds it ironic that technoscience has abrogated to itself the right to define truths that are fixed and universal. The early purveyors of the scientific revolution, to the contrary, sought to make knowledge contingent on experimentation so as to avert the terrors of holy civil wars and arbitrary monarchs. But somewhere along the way facts and self-evidence became the tools for a modern form of mental tyranny.

Mosaiclike browsers provide the stage for making hypertext and hypergraphic connections. The actual results, however, depend on daily negotiations. Pathways through the Web therefore are not predetermined, but are filled with agendas, conflicts, and partial testimonies to diverse experiences. Haraway suggests that despite our mystification of technology, the most important factors in the information game – regardless of whether it pertains to science or politics or both – are the "enrollments" (who shows up) and the "hybrids" they produce in their interaction.

The Buddhist notion of "emptiness," which appears regularly in Beat writing, is in many respects parallel to Haraway's idea of hypertext. The ability to simulate and interact with the moment was in their mind more important than calculation and repetition of that reality. "Emptiness implies a common space, yet not a common mind with archetypes and messages running back and forth," explained Ginsberg. "Just as the Internet represents a collective body of information, creativity is distributed throughout the network."

Asked whether John Perry Barlow's depiction of the Net as "hardwiring the collective consciousness" (see "A Globe, Clothing Itself with a Brain," Wired 3.06, page 108) might resonate, Ginsberg deferred. "It sounds like Barlow may be trapped in some monotheistic hierarchization of consciousness: one central repository, almost like a god, but in this case more like a noosphere." Ginsberg then immediately rattled off a phrase from a favorite poem, "There are no hierarchies, only many eyes to be looked out of."

Given their historical context, the Beats were ever wary of efforts to collectivize creativity, be the motivation utopian or fascist. Many of the Beats found solace in Buddhism for the very reason that it offered channels for linking the solitary mind to a deeper consciousness of the universe, without causing one to lose oneself in groupthink.

Limits on communications in 1950s America reduced politics, reason, and ethics to a narrow technoscientific project called the Cold War. The web of secrecy ran from the bedroom to the top of the government, tightly regulating the kinds of intercourse that were permitted in the private and public spheres of society. In this claustrophobic environment, the writings of the Beats begged for candor about sexuality, politics, drugs, and money.

Burroughs exposed the dark side of this state regimentation in Naked Lunch, his drug-soaked parody of social control. The "Senders" are a scientific-industrial élite who gather at a National Electronic Conference in order to map out the future of the social order. They pass a legal mandate requiring every surgeon to install a miniature transmitter into the neural pathways of the citizenry, so that subjects will send messages of their internal feelings and thoughts back to the State. But the Senders decide that a citizen must never receive a message, lest he "recharge himself by contact." Burroughs later reveals the Senders' rationale for one-way telepathic control: "Power groups of the world frantically cut lines of connection."

Ginsberg was convinced that the struggle for the free exchange of information was far from over in the digital age. "The key to hierarchical power is the maintenance of secrecy," he rasped in a weak voice.

His remarks extended far beyond censorship to address the very exercise of political power in the age of communications. After four decades as a public artist, he had reached the conclusion that the health of a democratic society required open and accessible information. "Why should we have classified documents?" he wondered aloud. "I'm happy for the government to know everything about me as long as I have access to everything that is going on in their lives and among their political alliances."

Ginsberg claimed that such candor lay at the very heart of what it meant to be a "Beat." While tons of ink have been spilled trying to define the significance of the name, he suggested that Kerouac got it best way back in On the Road: "Everything belongs to me because I am poor."

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